«My research puts its foundation on the narrative of the unexplained, on the corporeality, its miseries, and its beauty.

It is the claim of imperfection and its "self-compliant" purity, the beginning of a strange, unnatural eternity. An imperfect humanity animated by unbalanced creatures that light up for salvation at the very moment in which there is emotional exchange and the dialogue with their creator.

A decadent and alienative stage where disharmony and grotesque reveal the presumption of pleasure; bodies concealing secrets and fears, shadows live near the fall, motionless, waiting for their personal happiness.»

This is how the Sergio Padovani describes his artistic journey. Let's see a selection of images along with some other reflections about his work and creative process.

Sergio Padovani was born in 1972 in Modena, Italy, but artistically is little more than a novel: his first exhibition was in fact the 2007 Art Prize at the Museum of the Permanent of Milan, until that time he was "only" a musician. Since then, however, its rise has begun in the art world, with personal and collective exhibitions in private galleries and institutional spaces and art fairs.

Sergio Padovani is artistically fruitful: we can safely divide his production into neighbors in time depending on the type of subject and the medium of expression. The "brand" is always that, bitumen and medieval suggestions of the Germanic area and Flemish sorcery, but the productivity of the firm is always in full swing and it strives for technical innovations with regularity.

«Music has been and still it's very important for me. I was definitely interested by the composition, whereas the live performance, where the exhibition embodies other aspects and where the repetition becomes the rule, moved to the background. Years later different musical experiments, I have understood that I had to change the approach to artistic communication and therefore, thanks to a casual meeting with Odilon Redon's painting, I decided to "explore" the painting, where the compositional aspect is total, while the one of the exhibition is, for me, completely void. The perfect solution. The passage between an artistic language and the other one has been extremely natural and fluid…After all, I exactly paint as I play, in research and improvisation, also considering the silences, the noise as a sound. I think each framework has its own sound, that changes and evolves as the canvas evolves.»

«I believe that my paintings represent not only the dark and heavy world's disharmony, but also happy disharmony of daily lives. I think that each darkness has light inside itself and vice versa…. it's important that we do not limit the nature of this condition through the adjectives "positive" and "negative". This long prologue because I believe that everyone, even the most distant person from the inspiring spirit of my work, can find something that recognizes, something who knows. Painting of the past has taught us what man is and does, in his majesty and in his desperation without reductions... Just think about masters as Bosch, Bruegel, Van Der Weiden and many others. It's an important key, for me, to not forget their great example and maintain the tradition.»

«My transformation [since my firs exhibition in 2007] simply starts from my body survey, which now feels the need to go beyond the same body. When I began to paint, I wanted the narrative to be present only on the subject of the painting, on every patch of its flesh, so the total meaning must be all within one predominant element: what it meant all the rest needed be vacuous, empty. Now, after several passages, this narrated body has entered an environment, took possession of it, changed it into its image and likeness and became one with it.»

«I act quite simply, by channeling all my cultural backgrounds, all my influences and all the conditions of my working time in a direction. A way to find, after an hard working time, a common sense of all this path. This is the subject and the storytelling of the painting. I act instinctively in front of a naked canvas ... starting to paint until I do not recognize an image. The only rule is to follow without repentance the "foetus image" that I perceive in the canvas. No, I'm not religious, but I totally respect the religious aesthetic and its narrative creation. Pictorial themes chained to religion are eternal, therefore it would be impossible for me not exalt them ... and then the ancient churches are magnificent places.»

«Death, indeed, it is a necessary aspect to the life and, in a sense, the child is more closer to it than meets the eye. I mean that the relationship of the infancy with the death is much more natural and communicative ... adults transmit the fear. To inoculate the baby's head that death is pain and sadness. In effects the death's feeling is the reason that drives us to live and to research and improve every day more ... is the concept of the end of something that gives us the urge to start a route. Anyway, nothing is really lost, nothing dies ... it's just transformation of the elements ... as we transform ourselves in life, we are transformed by the death .My characters always have the deadly aura to their sides, but, despite that, they seek their inadequate and unattainable happiness. Just like us.»

«To be an Artist with capital 'A', today, it is very difficult, because in my opinion, in the same "container" there are so many talented artists and as many as not. I think that being in the most dignified way possible is to work as much as possible on your own language, trying to find out what it is to find a proper technique, a gradual path that reveals different dimensions of painting and painting. Do it without looking for mischief shortcuts far from your job. It is a slow and difficult progressive discovery, and whoever faces it has to prepare for the fact that it will probably never happen completely; for this reason I consider myself a creator of paintings rather than an artist. I believe that the word "artist" really only emerges after the subject of the subject (works, life, communication, ingenuity ...) has been thoroughly examined, otherwise it is likely to give this term simply a descriptive and ineffective role. Today Tradition, I believe, must be more than ever brought to light, codified and renewed: each has its own artistic tradition on which to find the basis of its own "journey"! In my case it is about the rediscovery of medieval aesthetics, especially Northern Europe, which I consider to be deeply bound up with my concept of work from the beginning.»

Sergio Padovani's personal exhibition "Sanctimonia" - a Latin term that indicates holiness and purity - refers to the dichotomous and ambiguous relationship between Good and Evil, a war that is in progress from antiquity to modern times. The show offer a new series of unpublished paintings specially made for the artist's double exposure, which refer to saints, some well known in the local area, others martyred.

The choice of the artist and curator has fallen on some of the figures of saints prevailing in the historical-artistic tradition - among which some venerated right in the territory of Imola - both on little-known personalities of different historical periods and different geographic areas, forgotten ones nowadays or little considered to have particularly interesting peculiarities. The project was elaborated after an accurate study that also captured the famous collection of biographies of the Dominican Friar of the Dominican Friar Jacopo da Varagine, compiled from 1260 and completed in 1298, to the death of the author, in which the religious collected , in a solemn organized according to the liturgical year, about one hundred and fifty years of saints privileging the ancient ones, but without neglecting its era.

The project reconstructs in the central spaces of the gallery a sort of votive chapel to recreate the atmosphere of gathering in front of allegorical images of saints and saints with their own iconographic attributes, explaining their relation to the devil and the ultraterrenal dimension, while in the next door are portraits of small heretics or excluded from the Church, which therefore have no access to sacred space.

If you want to deepen, there are plenty of interviews, reviews and articles about the artist and his work in his Website's "Writings" section.Is there also a radio interview (Italian) in Dolce Far Niente, Radionuova in Blu, in two parts, here and here.
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